DON'T OVERLOOK EAGLE-EYE SCOUTS

On a warm Arizona day last September, at a minor league baseball game, before a crowd of almost no one, Jim Fleming fell in love. OK, that's a bit strong. But his trained eye noticed something. His mind saw possibilities.

Fleming's title is -- take a deep breath -- the Marlins' assistant to the general manager and vice president of player development and scouting. That's a lot of big words for a job that can be summed up as: Find good players.

He was in Arizona to rate Marlins prospects. But at batting practice before this game he noticed a player from the other team. The kid had a nice swing. He had power. The ball kept leaping off his bat like hope.

Fleming had never seen this guy before. He looked at the name on the roster: Dan Uggla.

Other Marlins scouts knew him by then, though. And if you want to know the story of the 2006 Marlins -- if you want to know why their young pitching looks strong, how they're growing answers across the lineup and why there's even crazy talk of playoff contention the season after dismantling the roster -- the top reason is the work of General Manager Larry Beinfest and the scouts under him you rarely hear about.

You can see their work taking form. There's the rise of pitcher Josh Johnson. There are the three young arms who came from Chicago in the Juan Pierre deal. The trade of Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell to Boston, painful as it was, looks like the rarest of all sporting animals: a good-for-both-teams deal with the manner in which rookies Hanley Ramirez and Anibal Sanchez are playing.

The story of Uggla attending the All-Star Game in a Marlins uniform is the short-term surprise of them all. It didn't start one day in Arizona with Fleming watching batting practice. It actually began last spring in Tennessee.

That's where scout Tommy Thompson first came across Uggla in the Double-A Southern League. They always do this discovery scene better in the movies. Hollywood shows some scout hiring sherpas to trek to the home of the next Albert Pujols or getting lost on a country road, stopping for lemonade and stumbling on a kid throwing 100 mph against a barn door.

"What's the kid's name?" the scout asks.

"Nolan Ryan," a neighbor says.

The truth is more bland. Thompson sits and watches games. Lots and lots of games. He has seen each Southern League team play 10 to 15 times already this year. He'll watch a team play five straight games before starting any conclusions on players.

It's not just watching games, though. It's batting practice, infield practice, everything around the game. Thompson loves it, too. At 59, he's the classic baseball scout. He'll have spent 40 years in the minors next season -- eight years as a player, 20 as a manager and now 11 as a scout.

Last spring, he noticed Uggla, who was the second baseman for the Arizona affiliate in Sevierville, Tenn.

"First of all, he could hit," Thompson said of Uggla. "He never missed a fastball. And there was the hard-nosed way he went about his work. There's a word I'll use in reports for guys like him that I like. I call them "warriors."

If Thompson likes a player, he'll write a paragraph about him in the report. With Uggla, he wrote two.

"I was just doing my job, making my recommendations," he said. "The credit goes up the line to the people who made the decisions."

His direct boss is Dan Jennings, the Marlins' vice president of player personnel. Jennings went to the Southern League All-Star Game last year. That was his first view of Uggla. He noticed Uggla's forearms -- "flippers," Jennings called them. "They were like [former major-leaguer] Ron Cey. Powerful."

So by the time Fleming saw Uggla play in the Arizona League, the Marlins were tracking him. They knew a couple of other things by then, too.

First, Uggla had spent five years in the minors and thus would be available to any team for a bargain $50,000 under the Rule 5 draft so long as they kept him on the major league roster the next year. Second, the Marlins' dismantling meant there would be room on the roster.

There were issues. Uggla's fielding, for one. Everyone graded it as the issue it remains today. Still, Thompson and Jennings said what Fleming did: "With [infield coach] Perry Hill, I always grade up a notch knowing he's going to get them to improve."

Next came the look into Uggla's make-up. The trick was to inquire about his personality without tipping competitors off you were looking at him. "It's almost as if you're playing Texas hold 'em with 29 other teams," Jennings said. "You don't want to show your hand."

When the list of all Rule 5 players came out, Thompson checked Uggla off as the only name he'd take.

Jennings mentioned Uggla's name first at a Rule 5 meeting of top Marlins brass. Fleming was right behind. This was important, top scouts putting their reputations on the line.

Ultimately, it came to Beinfest to pull the trigger. When he did, Fleming took a call from his front-office counterpart in Arizona. "You took my man," he told Fleming.

The Marlins obviously are too poor to spend like New York and Boston. They're too smart to buy second-tier names like Kansas City and Pittsburgh. To go their less-traveled route demands Beinfest and his scouts be better than their opponents.

Here's one scoreboard: Uggla, plucked from Arizona, is an All-Star. Arizona second baseman Orlando Hudson is hitting .259 in his fifth major league season.